Vlad Chiriches reveals his prison break to Tottenham Hotspur

Former Steaua Bucharest defender's move to Premier League nearly fell through
after the club's jailed owner blocked the move

Making a noise: Vlad Chiriches is quietly establishing himself as part of Andre Villas-Boas's squad Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Ian Winrow

10:00PM GMT 02 Nov 2013

Vlad Chiriches has revealed how his summer move to Tottenham Hotspur was almost blocked from within the walls of a Romanian prison.

The defender eventually completed his £8.5 million move from Steaua Bucharest at the end of the summer transfer deadline window, but Andre Villas-Boas, the Tottenham manager, believed he had got his man at the start of August, before Steaua owner Gigi Becali blocked the move while he was behind bars while serving a three-year sentence for offences related to land exchange deals.

Chiriches is quietly establishing himself as part of Villas-Boas’s squad and will make his third consecutive league start if he lines up at Everton on Sunday.

But at the time of Becali’s intervention, the 23-year-old, who six years ago spent a short time at Benfica before returning home homesick, feared his chance of a switch to the Premier League was gone before managing to force a move away from Bucharest after making it clear he wanted to leave.

“There were some complications with the owner of Steaua Bucharest but they resolved it and now I’m here,” said the Romania international. “It’s in the past and now I’m living in the present and the future.

“Sure, I was worried the move wouldn’t happen. When you see you’re so close to a big club and something happens it’s a bad feeling. I was worried I would not get to play here in the Premier League at such big club. But I told them ‘I want to go, I want to go’ and the result is it was resolved.”

Chiriches’s introduction to life at Tottenham has not been without incident with Villas-Boas reacting angrily to comments made by, Victor Becali, the player’s agent and a relative of the Steaua owner, suggesting his client has been monitored by Jose Mourinho and viewed his long-term future at Chelsea.

The player, though, denies any knowledge of Chelsea’s interest in him and insists he is focused on following in the footsteps of Gica Popescu and Ilie Dumitrescu and establishing himself at Tottenham. In fact, Chiriches claims he was convinced to move to the club after consulting with the pair who were at Spurs in the mid-Nineties.

“I watched the Premier League all the time,” said the defender. “I didn’t know much about the history of Tottenham but I spoke with some past players who came here — Popescu, Dumitrescu — and they told me it’s a big club with big history.”

He added: “I played for small teams before and this was every step for two years. I played for Steaua, a big club in Romania, and now this is the biggest step in my life. My style is a little bit different but I think English football has changed a lot and now they pass a lot and they dribble. I have to improve physically and I think I’ll be better game by game.”